Cloud Leverage Offers Really Cheap Online Storage

A new cloud data storage company came out of stealth mode this week, promising enterprise-class online storage a for a nickel a gigabyte per month with no data transfer or bandwidth charges.

Asked how Cloud Leverage can afford to offer enterprise-class cloud storage for so little, company President and CTO Jonathan Hoppe replied, "Great question. I wish more people would ask other providers why they are charging so much."

Hoppe said Cloud Leverage "does not take any shortcuts in terms of performance, redundancy and security," and is profitable at its price of a nickel a gigabyte per data center, particularly if customers use the service for a full year.

"Storage costs have decreased steadily over time, and we have been able to leverage these lower prices," Hoppe said. "If you look at the history of storage, when Amazon came out with their storage offering, SATA storage had just reached a new all-time low of roughly $1 per gigabyte. Today, Amazon's storage is only slightly cheaper, but SATA storage is now 10 cents per gigabyte (based on a 2TB disk drive). So all the providers using commodity storage, like Amazon, do not seem to be lowering their prices to reflect their cost savings."

Hoppe said Cloud Leverage uses a global footprint of 32 data centers from managed hosting provider Netriplex, the company that is largely funding Cloud Leverage. "Thus, we are able to avoid the overhead and investment expense of creating such a large platform," he said.

He expects that customers will recognize the protection and performance benefits of choosing more than one location, hence the option of storing data in more than one data center.

For security, Cloud Leverage uses SSL on data in transit, AES on data at rest, rights management for user access to files and screening of the credentials of employees who have access to the data center and the cloud.

The company also offers a REST API, native Windows desktop support, a Windows Sync client, a WebDAV client for Linux and Mac, and mobile clients for Blackberry, Windows Mobile and iPhone. Other features include deleted file recovery capability, CDN publishable URL and caching and acceleration.